John Storey

Written from the perspective of cultural studies, the chapter seeks to briefly explore the relationship between popular culture and the production of knowledge. To fully understand this relationship we must first address the difficulties that surround the concept of popular culture. While it may seem obvious what it is, once we think about it historically and theoretically it becomes very clear that there is in fact many versions of popular culture. To demonstrate this I outline five ways in which popular culture has been conceptualized and show how each theorisation carries with it a different understanding of what we are doing when we engage in the study of popular culture. Each definition is accompanied by a discussion of the connection between popular culture and the dissemination of knowledge. However, making a connection between popular culture and knowledge is ultimately an empirical question, one that can only really be answered by detailed investigation of the consumption of popular texts and practices. Therefore, any claims made here during this short chapter are inevitably speculative and a little abstract, driven as they are by theoretical extrapolation.

Consuming Utopia builds on critical insights into consumption and utopianism developed in two previous books by the author to elaborate what it means to read utopian fiction from the critical perspective of cultural studies. With a critical focus on social practices of reading rather than on the text itself, John Storey advances a timely and relevant contribution to existing debates on utopian fiction, offering new insights into how we might understand the politics of utopian fiction. Finding readership and readers indispensable to the act of producing politics beyond the text, Storey argues that if utopian fiction has a 'politics', it is determined by those who, in actuality, pick up books and act on what they read, rather than readers proposed by textuality. By engaging with seminal concepts in cultural studies, this book shows how reading utopian fiction works to make the meaning of such texts material and social, and therefore available for politics. An essential addition to the literature on utopian fiction, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, literary studies, comparative literature, cultural politics, utopian studies, and political theory.